Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (30 page)

Every day, from the moment he woke up in his metal-frame bed, pushed into the wide hallway because it was cooler than his room, to the moment he climbed back into it at night, Churchill brooded over his plan. Whenever he could, he picked up more bits of information, slips of intelligence that gave him ideas or helped him refine his strategy. Although he made a careful study of the prison, no aspect of it interested him more than the ZARPs.

As little respect as Churchill had for the men who guarded him, he knew that they were dangerous. He also knew that they, and not the fences that encircled the prison, were his only real barrier to freedom. “
No walls,” he wrote, “are so hard to pierce as living walls.” About forty ZARPs had been assigned to the Staats Model School, but only ten of them were on permanent sentry duty at any one time. The other thirty could be found wandering aimlessly around Pretoria or hanging listlessly about the prison, bored, irritable, angry and, Churchill hoped, easily distracted.

The ZARPs, Churchill knew, were at their most vulnerable at night. The thirty men not on duty slept in a tent that had been pitched in a corner of the rectangular prison yard. Before wrapping themselves in blankets, most of them took off their boots, their belts and even their clothes, and they stacked their rifles and bandoliers in piles around the tent poles. One of their number usually stood guard over them, but Churchill had noticed that there were times, often in the midst of a guard change, when they had no protection at all. “
There were therefore periods in the night,” he wrote, “when these thirty men, sleeping…within fifty yards of sixty determined and athletic officers, were by no means so safe as they supposed.”

Even Churchill admitted that overwhelming the ten men who were awake and armed would be more difficult, but he had plans for them as well. The Staats Model School had a gymnasium with a “good supply” of dumbbells. These could be used, Churchill thought, in a surprise attack. “
Who shall say that three men in the dark, armed with dumbbells, desperate and knowing what they meant to do,” he wrote, “are not a match for one man who, even though he is armed, is unsuspecting and ignorant of what is taking place?”

Churchill’s plan did not end at the Staats Model School. He had not forgotten the men languishing at the racecourse. Occasionally, soldier-servants who had run afoul of either the Boer guards or their own officers would be replaced by men from the racecourse, who brought with them news of the other POW camp in Pretoria. From these reports, the officers knew that these men were miserable, and prime for a rebellion. “
Their life was monotonous, their rations short, their accommodations poor,” Churchill wrote. “They were hungry and resentful.”
So bad, in fact, were the conditions at the racecourse that a small group of English sympathizers had secretly put together a fund to raise money for food and medical supplies for the men. There were also only about 120 ZARPs, with two machine guns between them, to guard about two thousand British soldiers. It would require “
nothing but leading,” Churchill thought, “to make them rise against their guards.”

Churchill shared his plan with a few of the officers, and had little
difficulty persuading them to join him. Although he was one of the youngest men in the prison, and the only civilian, he was an extraordinarily persuasive speaker. “
He talks brilliantly,” a journalist would write of Churchill just a few months later, “in a full clear voice, and with great assurance.” Even to the point of stirring rebellion at the racecourse, the men were willing to follow his lead. Beyond that point, however, Churchill’s plan took a sudden, staggering turn, taking on an almost fantastical sheen. It had become, in his mind, not just an escape but a “great and romantic enterprise.”

Even years later, Churchill would write of the plan in a near frenzy of excitement, punctuating his descriptions of each stage with a feverish “What next?” or “What then?” The final phase, as he saw it, was not merely freedom but a full-scale takeover of the Transvaal capital, which included, of course, the kidnapping of its president. Were it realized to its fullest extent, his plan would, he believed, so stagger the Boers that it would bring the war to a sudden and decisive end. “
What a feat of arms! President Kruger and his Government would be prisoners in our hands,” he wrote. “Perhaps with these cards in our hands we could negotiate an honourable peace, and end the struggle by a friendly and fair arrangement which would save the armies marching and fighting. It was a great dream.”

It was, in fact, too great, too dazzling, too theatrical—altogether too much. When some of the senior officers in the prison found out about the young correspondent’s wildly ambitious plan, and the men he had already recruited for it, they quickly put an end to it all. Churchill was disappointed but, as ever, unrepentant. “
Who shall say what is possible or impossible?” he wrote defiantly. “In these spheres of action one cannot tell without a trial.”

Although they had dismissed Churchill’s dream of taking over Pretoria and defeating the Boers in one brilliant stroke, even the most levelheaded among them knew that escape from the Staats Model School was possible. In fact, it had been done.
On December 7, three
days before the start of Black Week, two soldier-servants had climbed over the back fence while the rest of the prisoners were eating dinner, a time when, Haldane had noticed, “the vigilance of the sentries was somewhat relaxed.” The guards, perhaps embarrassed or worried that they would be punished, had said nothing about the escape to their superiors. The men were not well known and would not be quickly missed. They were, however, quickly caught. They hadn’t made it far from Pretoria when they were picked up and, rather than being returned to the POW camp, were put in a Boer prison.

“
The escape of these men,” Haldane wrote, “made one feel that no time was to be lost.” While Churchill had been indoctrinating the other officers, making his plan ever bigger, more ambitious and more wide reaching, Haldane had been working quietly with Brockie. It had not taken them long to come up with a plan that they were confident would work. With his natural resourcefulness and his command of both Dutch and Zulu, Brockie was exactly the man Haldane needed.
Like Haldane, Brockie had no patience for theatrics. He was not interested in impressing anyone. He simply wanted to get out, quickly and quietly, and he certainly didn’t want to do it with fanfare.

Haldane and Brockie’s plan was as simple as Churchill’s was elaborate. Like the soldier-servants who had escaped early in December, they planned to climb over the iron paling that formed the enclosure along the back of the prison yard. The problem was the sentries who, since the humiliation of the earlier escape, were more vigilant, and more than willing to shoot if given any excuse. Haldane had attempted to bribe one of the friendlier guards, offering him £100 to “
look the other way,” but while the man was sympathetic, he was, Haldane wrote with disappointment, “not to be tampered with.” The ZARP also pointed out to Haldane the futility of his ambition. “He said that if I got out of the building I could never get out of the country, there were so many patrols and other precautions to prevent the escape of prisoners,” Haldane wrote. “In any case the sentries on his right hand and left would see, and not be silent.”

It was also true that even at night the prison yard was drenched
in light. “
The whole enclosure,” Churchill wrote, “was brightly and even brilliantly lighted by electric lights on tall standards.” When the prisoners discovered that the electrical wires for the lights had been threaded through the dormitories where they slept, one of the men who had been trained as an electrician insisted that he could “
disconnect them at any moment and plunge the whole place in pitch darkness.” They even went so far as to test the theory, causing the lights to go out one night in a sudden blackout, and then just as quickly blaze back on.

Haldane and Brockie, however, wanted no part of any plan that would attract attention or require complicated maneuverings and additional people. Nor, for their purposes, did they need the entire enclosure to be dark, just a corner of it. Although the security lights stood in the middle of the quadrangle, bathing nearly all of the enclosure in bright light, Haldane had noticed that they left a small slice of the eastern wall in shadow. “
Only one sentry could possibly see any one climbing over,” he observed, “and if his back were turned, provided he heard nothing, his eyes would certainly be of no avail.”

Getting over the wall, the men knew, would require both skill and luck. But it would also be only the beginning of their journey. Even if they succeeded in eluding the ZARPs, they would still be far from their final destination—Portuguese East Africa, now known as Mozambique, situated almost due east on Africa’s Indian Ocean coast. A territory of the Portuguese Empire, which had been the world’s first global empire, it was Transvaal’s closest neighbor, less than three hundred miles from Pretoria, and neutral territory in the Boer War.
To get there, however, Haldane and Brockie would have to make their way out of Pretoria, navigate the countless guards and checkpoints that dotted hundreds of miles of Transvaal landscape, find the railroad that led to Delagoa Bay, on the coast of Portuguese East Africa, jump a train and hide on board during the long overland journey, hoping no one would search it.

To further complicate matters, the two men soon had another problem: Winston Churchill. After his own escape plan had been shut down, Churchill had immediately begun trawling for another.
Keeping his eyes and ears open for opportunities, he quickly figured out that two of his roommates had banded together and were planning an escape. Brockie, Churchill knew, would be resistant to his joining their plan. Haldane, on the other hand, would have a difficult time refusing him.

Churchill knew things about Aylmer Haldane that nearly no one else knew. For whatever reason, soon after they had begun their friendship, Haldane had decided to confide in Churchill. In fact, he had told him the greatest secret, and burden, of his life: He was married.

More than a decade earlier, when Haldane was a twenty-six-year-old lieutenant stationed in Belfast, Ireland, he had met a young barmaid named Kate Stuart. The two had married on July 13, 1888, but apparently knowing even at the time that he had made a mistake, Haldane had insisted that they keep their marriage a secret. Soon after, he had returned to England, leaving behind not just his life in Ireland, but his new wife as well.

Kate, however, had refused to simply fade into the past.
In 1893, after years of impatient waiting and unanswered letters, she had traveled to England and tracked her husband down at the Staff College, a military academy at Camberley, Surrey, where he was briefly in charge of the officers’ mess.
She wanted more money, she told him, but more than that, she wanted a home. Terrified that the other officers would find out about his wife, Haldane had told her that he would try to send more money, but he refused to make a life with her. The following year, he left for India, where he met Churchill and, feeling desperate and trapped, unburdened himself to his new friend.

Churchill was nothing if not sympathetic. “
She tricked him on the same line as in Jude the Obscure,” he had written to his mother after hearing Haldane’s story. “Being conscientious he behaved ‘honourably’ and has been miserable ever since. He has never lived with
her—hates the sight of her. Offers her half of all he has in the world to divorce him. Futile.” Kate, who, Churchill delicately confided to his mother, was “not originally
virgo intacta
,” wanted more than money. She wanted to be a lady. As long as he was married to her, however, Haldane could never rise within the hierarchy of the British military, a situation that, to Churchill, was not only appalling but quite possibly worthy of drastic actions. “I questioned him about her health,” he wrote with the pity of a pragmatist. “Excellent. I am afraid I could suggest nothing better than Murder—and there are objections to that of course.”

After he and Haldane had left India and parted ways, Churchill had tried to express his concern in letters, but had ended up making his friend feel even worse. “
It is all very sad. Nor do I see any light,” Churchill had written to Haldane in 1898. “Who knows that if luck & fortune are on your side the stimulus may not be removed….But this is trying to see a silver lining to a very black cloud.” It was unfortunate, he wrote a few months later, that the problem could not forcibly be removed. “
I hope the millstone is weighting lightly,” he wrote. “You must not despair of its fretting through the cord that binds it to your neck—of its own weight. It is a pity you cannot cut it—one stroke. But people put cords to so many uses.”